Political and Economic Thought of German Neo-Liberals

In the last ten years the economic and political consensus that characterised the Western world has disintegrated. This consensus, holding that economic growth, full employment and a more or less stable price level could be achieved by macro-economic management of the economy without any fundamental damage being done to the micro-structure of a basically private enterprise system or to that impersonal rule of law on which free economic transactions depend, seemed to signal the end of ideological disputes between advocates of collectivist and individualist forms of social and economic organisation. Indeed, the famous ‘calculation debate’, which divided the two schools in the 1930s and 1940s, seemed to have receded into the textbooks on the history of economic thought.1